The Aids road to hell: is it paved with good intentions?
The pandemic began in Africa. Yes, but why and how?
Joseph Benarrous, Forthcoming in Politique Africaine Translated from the French.
It is not my intention in this study to comment on the staggering numbers of victims of the Aids pandemic, but rather to try and assess our knowledge to date as to what has caused the illness and the factors that have enabled it to spread so easily. This will also be an opportunity to bring to the fore once more, against the prevailing amnesia, the way in which the colonial powers have used Africa as a trial ground and Africans as experiment fodder, albeit under the guise of humanitarian aid. At the present time, when we are spending a lot of time holding forth on the physical impossibility of providing care in the poor countries, it is certainly difficult, but useful nonetheless, consider the question from an opposite standpoint.
World scientists gather in Durban today to discuss the epidemic sweeping the continent. But still we don't know how it began. Edward Hooper returns to Uganda where 14 years ago he first charted the scale of the calamity. His fears have been confirmed, he argues: we unwittingly sparked the horror with a contaminated polio vaccine
Prospect (UK), June 2000, pp. 31-35; reprinted as "The true origin of AIDS" in Mail and Guardian (Johannesburg), 7-13 July 2000, pp. 22-23, 31.
Most scientists believe that Aids was "naturally" transferred from primates to human beings via a hunter who ate a chimpanzee. But a competing theory claims that Aids was caused in the 1950s when thousands of Africans were given a live polio vaccine derived from chimp kidneys. The stakes are getting higher.
Why is Aids an epidemic? Edward Hooper spent years looking for the source, and his book has sparked controversy over claims of human error in the vaccination programmes
Published in The Guardian, Wednesday 5 April 2000
In June 1981, two unusual events occurred in very different parts of the world. In Los Angeles, five gay men fell sick with rare symptoms suggestive of immunological problems, which prompted two local doctors to write a paper for the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Meanwhile, in Mugana, northern Tanzania, a German missionary doctor saw five women from the Ugandan border region, all suffering from untreatable anaerobic ulcers of the groin and anus. Some new pathogen was abroad, and these doctors were among the first to recognise that fact.
Scientists in three laboratories in the United States and Europe are gearing up to test samples of an experimental polio vaccine stored for more than 40 years to determine whether it might have inadvertently been the spark that ignited the worldwide AIDS epidemic.
[Article about The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS]
Contaminated polio vaccines started AIDS in Africa in the '50s. A National Enquirer headline? No. It's the premise of a big new book fueling an old controversy among researchers.
Could a human error in 1950s medical research be the cause of the massive global catastrophe of AIDS?
POZ Magazine, March 2000
A highly controversial book positing just such a theory has been kicking up dust in the AIDS research world since its release last September. The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS (Little, Brown and Company/Boston), written by British medical researcher and former BBC correspondent Edward Hooper, proposes that HIV emerged from a contaminated batch of experimental oral polio vaccine (OPV) administered to Africans in the late 1950s.
[Commentary on The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS]
Scientists from the Wistar Institute conducted polio-vaccine tests in the Congo region in the late 1950s. That, a British journalist believes, is when the chimpanzee virus was introduced in humans. The scientists say that's not true.
By Huntly Collins PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
Philadelphia Inquirer, Monday 8 November 1999
After years of speculation, scientists now agree that the AIDS pandemic began when an AIDS-like virus from a chimpanzee, probably in west-central Africa, jumped species and infected a human being sometime around the middle of this century.
